On Thursday, 4 July 2019 at 17:00:33 UTC, Q. Schroll wrote:
Probably you've come over this problem once in a while, too.
You have a repeating solution, so you use a for(each) loop.
Sometimes, there is an action to be performed between the end
of one iteration and the beginning of the next, if there is
one. The prime example is printing the comma when printing a
list: There is one between any two elements, but neither is one
at front or behind the last one.
Typical solutions I employed were:
1 Handling the first element separately
2 Condition in the loop, that is false exactly for the first
iteration.
1 can be done with ranges easily:
if (!range.empty)
{
action(range.front);
range.popFront;
foreach (element; range)
{
betweenAction();
action(element);
}
}
This approach is clearly quite verbose for the problem, but
there's nothing done unnecessarily.
2 can be done easily, too:
foreach (i, element; range)
{
if (i > 0) betweenAction();
action(element);
}
While 2 is less code, it's prone to be checked every iteration.
Note that 2 is rather D specific in its length. It can be done
in other languages, but is more verbose.
Is there a cleaner solution that I missed?
As far as I can interpret it, joiner
https://dlang.org/library/std/algorithm/iteration/joiner.html
uses roughly the first approach.